Existing GUI text editing practice has a Cursor that floats unchanged over the text, and provides no indication of where in the text the Caret will be placed when the user clicks. Existing practice is also either all-or-nothing when it comes to showing normally-invisible characteristics of the text data only, with an on-off feature called “Show Invisibles”, “Show White Space”, or the like, which applies to all spacing characters in the entire file. Only actual spacing characters in the text data are shown, and other kinds of invisible characteristics, such as line-wrapping within a paragraph, paragraph breaks, indents, and vertical and horizontal gaps between paragraphs and between text and other graphical elements are not shown.
The combined results of all of these factors is that it is difficult to position the Cursor correctly, so that when the Mouse is clicked, the Caret will be in the desired location.
I am aware of only one piece of art in GUI text editing that is relevant as background: The text drag-and-drop feature of the Sun Microsystems Java Swing UI toolkit does show a continuously-updated indicator of where dragged text will be inserted as you drag the Cursor over the text; however, an icon at the cursor largely obscures this indicator until a version of their system released after the priority date of this patent application.